A few weeks ago I attended a MoDevDC Meetup at TeqCorner in McLean, Va., with my colleagues Andy Glover and Danny White (we also sponsored the event and gave away highly sought after beverage koozies!). In front of a packed house of more than 100 App developers, mobile experts and DC Tech community ambassadors, several App companies presented innovative concepts and platforms that set a lively and interactive tone for the evening. As a part of the “App Premier” portion of the program, I gave a brief demo of our MAM platform. Our approach to lifecycle MAM for the enterprise garnered a lot of interest and great questions from attendees, further reinforcing the idea that MAM stands to make a big impact in enterprise mobility.
Later in the evening, I participated in a panel with Alan Snyder, CEO of Boxtone, Terry Hsiao, CEO of Hook Mobile and Rich LaPerch, CEO of Aegis Mobile. Some key topics that emerged and opened the discussion on best practices and resource-sharing were:
- Mobile privacy remains a huge concern for the government;
- Policy (or lack thereof) plagues developers;
- Consumer Apps can potentially make great enterprise Apps (e.g., Evernote); and
- Emerging technologies like HTML5 have great possibility but won’t be the death knell for Apps (something I echoed in one of my previous posts).
The blend of these topics confirms for me that the idea of a “traditional” enterprise mobility model has changed. Efficiency, security and policy will remain at the core, but the mobile experience cannot be ignored. At the end of the day Apps need to work, and work well, whether they are delivered via HTML5 or natively. Enterprise App developers shouldn’t be afraid to take a cue from the consumer side either. There’s no rule that states that the creativity associated with consumer Apps shouldn’t or can’t apply in a business scenario where you fold in the critical management and infrastructure tools to deploy, track, analyze and secure enterprise Apps.
So what was my final takeaway? Enterprise Apps don’t have to be counter-intuitive, clunky and boring. There’s great potential to innovate and there’s no question that the future of enterprise Apps is bright.
